Labour has announced a £26 million Knife Crime Concentrations Fund, targeted at the 27 police forces whose patches account for 90 per cent of knife offences in England and Wales. The fund will pay for surge patrols, new CCTV, knife arches in transport hubs, and live facial recognition deployments. It is, on its own terms, perfectly sensible. The problem is the scale.
The Numbers Don't Add Up
£26 million split across 27 forces works out at just under a million pounds per force. For context, the Metropolitan Police alone investigates more than 14,000 knife-enabled offences a year. A single Met murder investigation routinely costs north of £500,000 by the time it reaches court. This fund will not survive contact with reality.
The most recent annual figures show roughly 53,000 knife-enabled offences across England and Wales. Knife homicides remain stubbornly above pre-pandemic levels. Hospital admissions for stab wounds in the under-25s continue to climb. The crisis is not a story about a few bad postcodes. It is a national crisis. £26 million is not a national response. It is a press release.
Crime and Policing Act 2026 — The Easy Bit
This fund sits alongside the Crime and Policing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent on 29 April. The Act creates a new offence of possessing a knife with intent to injure, raises penalties for manufacturing prohibited weapons, expands knife seizure powers, and strengthens prevention orders. All sensible. None of it is enforced if the police haven't got the bodies to enforce it.
That is the part Labour will not address. We are still down nearly 5,000 police officers compared to the peak of the police uplift programme. Custody capacity is full. Crown Court backlogs are at record highs. Pass the toughest knife law you like — if a young man caught with a blade in Birmingham is back on the street within hours and his case won't be heard for two years, the law is meaningless.
Live Facial Recognition — Coming, Slowly
Live facial recognition is genuinely promising. The Met has now arrested over a thousand wanted suspects using the technology, including for serious violence offences. Rolling it out across the 27 worst-affected force areas should have happened years ago. That this is being announced as a 2026 innovation, when the technology has been in operational use since 2017, tells you everything about the pace of British policing reform.
Civil liberties groups will, as ever, complain. They were equally exercised about CCTV, ANPR, fingerprint databases and DNA profiling. Each has gone on to be a routine and largely uncontroversial part of British policing. Live facial recognition will follow the same path. The only question is how many years of avoidable knife deaths it takes us to get there.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK's policing platform starts from a different place. 40,000 new officers, on the beat, in uniform, in the worst-affected wards. An end to the diversion of police time into non-crime hate incidents and online speech investigations — an area where Labour has finally been forced to retreat after years of Reform pressure. Mandatory custodial sentences for knife possession on a second offence. And an honest conversation about the social drivers of urban knife violence, including the role of fatherless households and gang recruitment in school-age children.
The knife crime epidemic is the price of two decades of decisions that prioritised the comfort of the political class over the safety of working communities. £26 million is a downpayment on undoing that. Reform UK is the only party offering the rest of the bill.